OStatic

I was never one for cryptozoological taxidermic creations -- you won't find mermonkeys or crocoducks on display in my home. I have, however, for the last few weeks, been hiding a jackalope in my laptop bag. He was an experimental little guy, but the folks at Canonical and the vast community behind Ubuntu have completed the necessary gene splicing and DNA alterations and soon -- very soon -- the final, stable release of Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) will be let loose into the wild.

What's new this time around? How does it all work? And for the wilder types, where locally can you attend a Jaunty Jackalope release party?

David Coursey at PCWorld knew full well he'd opened a can of worms when he asked why anyone would want an Android netbook. Personally, I'd rather have an Ubuntu Netbook Remix powered one, or one with an operating system tailored with the latest Moblin Image Creator utility, but I'm sort of one of those types anyway.

I love and use open source software, nearly exclusively. I think the last time I really sat down to run Windows was when I transferred Windows XP on to my husband's newly built mostly playtime machine. As much as I love open source software, however, I am a stronger advocate for having the right tool for the job, and using the software that works best for the user and the task at hand. The right tool can vary greatly between users, tasks and even hardware. I have a few qualms about Coursey's statement that nobody could possibly ever want an Android netbook, unless the price was signficantly lower. I just don't believe it, and the nature of netbooks, people's expectations of what they can (or can't) do, and hardware disparities between Linux and Windows models further complicates the netbook operating system war.